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Rules (from the WPC 2017 instruction booklet): “Place letters into some cells in the grid. Same letters cannot share a side, and blank cells cannot share a side. Each outlined region must be filled in alphabetical order, starting with ‘A’, from left to right and top to bottom. Each outlined region contains at least one blank cell. Cells with the letters form a single connected area.” There is also an example in the instruction booklet, which can be found here; it’s the first puzzle in round 18, PIC.

This was made as part of WPC preparation, and I do plan on posting a recap on my blog at some point, so you can look forward to hearing about my multiple one-cell errors and other misadventures. Overall, this was one of my favorite puzzle types in the Puzzle Innovation Contest; there are a lot of rules and they feel somewhat arbitrary, but they work together surprisingly well.

The break-in for this puzzle might be very hard and I think the solving path is fairly narrow (at least based on Palmer’s solving experience), so here is a ROT13’d hint for the first step if you’re stuck: Gur oernx-va vf fbzrjurer nebhaq gur zvqqyr bs gur gbc srj ebjf.

Due to a slight school schedule mishap (a particular online math course won’t start until October, and even so, I’ll still have 1-2 study halls a day), I’ll have quite a bit of time in my senior year to create logic puzzles when not doing homework or reading. As with many others, I’m making this blog to share puzzles with the rest of the world, so I hope you’ll enjoy solving them, even if they aren’t especially elegant or difficult.

I’ll probably start by posting some puzzles that I’ve already made, and then update this once every few days or so, until I start getting too much homework. I’ll also note that I don’t have a program to generate grids, though I might write one sometime if I figure out how to work with graphics in Java, so they will be Excel-generated (thanks to David Yang for teaching me how to do so :P) and might not be aligned too well.